❞ كتاب Contemporary Physicists and God rsquo s Existence ❝ ⏤ جعفر شيخ إدريس

Whether God exists or
not is not as such, part of the

subject matter of any empiri-
cal science, natural or social.

But the facts or what are
sometimes assumed to be the
facts of the natural sciences,

especially physics and biolo-
gy, are often interpreted to

support one view or the oth-
er. This is not therefore a pa-
per about physics, but about

the relationship between physics and the question of the ex-
istence of God. More specifically, it is mainly an Islamic ra-
tional critique of the ways modern atheists attempts to meet

the challenge posed by the Big Bang theory. It does not deal
with positive proofs for the existence of the Creator; it only

proves the invalidity of the arguments used to buttress athe-
ism.

One of the main arguments invoked in support of some
form or other of atheism has always been the claim that the
world, or some part of it, is eternal and, as such, needs no

creator. Thus, some Greek thinkers believed that the heaven-
ly bodies, especially the sun, were eternal. The main argu-
ment of one of them, Galen, was, according to Al-Ghazali,

that it has had the same size for continued for eons and

3

eons,a fact which shows that it is not perishable, for if it
were, it would have shown signs of decay, which it doesn’t.
Al-Ghazali says that this is not a good argument because:

First...we do not grant him that a thing cannot perish ex-
cept by decaying; decaying is only one way of perishing; but

it is not improbable for something to perish suddenly while
it is in its complete form. Second, even if we grant him that
there is no perishing without decay, whence does he know

that it does not suffer any decay? His reference to observa-
tion posts is not acceptable, because their quantities [the

quantities known by them] are known only approximately.
So if the sun, which is said to be a hundred and seventy
times or more the size of the earth1

1 We now know that it is definitely more. The mass of the sun is 333, 000
times that of the earth, and its radius is 109 times the earth’s radius.
, were to diminish by
amounts the size of mountains, that would not be apparent to

the senses. So it might be decaying, and might have de-
creased by amounts the size of mountains or more, but the

senses cannot perceive this ...” (Al-Ghazali, 126)

Al-Ghazali’s guess that the size of the sun might be di-
minishing was, as we can now see, a rare prescience of what

science would prove. Scientists now tell us that the sun does
indeed decay, but much more than he thought, and that it
will ultimately perish.
The amount of energy released by the sun is such that the

mass of the sun is decreasing at the rate of 4.3 billion kilo-
grams per second. Yet this is such a small fraction of the

sun’s mass that the change is hardly noticeable...
Our sun is believed to be about 4.5 billion years old, and

will probably continue its present activity for another 4.5 bil-
lion years. (Wheeler, 596)

 An Islamic Critical Evaluation of the Ideas of Some Contemporary Physicists: Part One: The eternalness of the universe and the decay of matter, and the implications of the Big Bang.
 An Islamic Critical Evaluation of the Ideas of Some Contemporary Physicists. Part two: Various hypotheses of what could stand as causes of beings or events.
 An Islamic Critical Evaluation of the Ideas of Some Contemporary Physicists: Part three: The only conclusion to the series of causes is that there be one ultimate and external cause which led to all others.